Google's Bookstore is Live, But How Does it Stack Up?

It was inevitable that it would come to this, but ultimately we all knew this was the direction Google was headed with their book project. Not simply scanning and indexing various libraries holdings, but moving toward e-readership was always in the cards for the search giant. And with their announcement today, Google moves into direct bookstore competition with Amazon, Apple, Barnes & Noble, Sony, and more.

Having learned from their predecessors, Google's new book offering features multiple platform reading and wireless syncing of position. Start a book on your laptop, continue on your phone, pick up where you left off on your tablet. Anywhere you have internet access you can read, while books downloaded to your Google Books (iTunes link) app can be read offline. But how do the locations stack up for Apple users?

Google Books in the browser

The strengths and weaknesses of Google Books' site depends on how you view it:

On a full-fledged computer, the various page layouts for finding books can still be a bit muddled.

For reading, the site redesign is beautiful, presenting either a double page spread or a single page, depending on how wide your browser window is set to, and navigation is a breeze.

The site works reasonably well on the iPad, though there the navigation buttons seemed unresponsive.

iPhone users will want to steer clear. Google Books on the iPhone's mobile Safari is no great shakes, either giving you a desktop version that requires immense amounts of pinching and zooming or its previous mobile-search-oriented screen that makes it difficult to get to your account. Books also seem impossible to actually view there without an immense effort.

Google Books Apps

Google Books app makes reading far more pleasurable and syncing easier, though again its clear that the folks at Google have really got their eyes fixed on the iPad rather than the smaller form factor of the iPhone.

Google Books first page on iPad

Pages are laid out with decent margins on the iPad, while the iPhone felt cramped and forced. Also in the iPad version, there was the option for to turn on or off the 3D style page turning, while the iPhone was restricted to a quick slide to the next page.

Google Books first page on iPhone, Night Theme

Settings

There seemed to be some standard features, though some expected features were lacking:

In neither iOS version were there advanced formatting features to allow for tweaks in indenting or margin size, though you could adjust the line spacing for a bit more pleasurable viewing (especially on the iPhone).

In both versions, there are day and night themes, seven built in fonts, the option to switch between flowing text and scanned pages of certain titles, and a few other formatting tweaks.

A neat addition allows you to hold your finger on a line of text and a magnifying pane will show you the print much larger.

At this point, however, there does not appear to be a way to add bookmarks or to get words defined as in many other e-readers.

Interestingly, page numbers were tied to physical pages, not digital ones, thus letting you read several page 14s until you reach page 14-15, then page 15 begins. (This will be appealing to the textbook market.)

Most surprising about the Google Books app is that there is no ability to read in landscape mode on either the iPhone or the iPad. While the option is clearly on Google's mind based on their own site, such a feature didn't somehow make it into the app.

Titles

All of the public domain books that Google previously offered are still here as well as new commercial titles such as the popular Girl With... series by Stieg Larsson and Jonathan Franzen's newest, Freedom.

New York Times Best Sellers are also well-represented.

Newer titles seem to range from $19.99 (Ken Follett's Fall of Giants) at the high end to $3.99 for popular titles now in their paperback incarnations (Dan Brown's The Lost Symbol) as well as free public domain offerings such as Dickens and Jane Austen.

Books purchased are added to your shelves, which can be manipulated at the Google Books home page, and sample chapters are available which also appear on your shelf.

What Google's size and scope will do to the quickly growing e-book model is hard to predict at this point, but they've come up with a decent first step in their marketing and presentation. We'll be interested to see how it grows from here.

Comments

The Google Books app stayed on my iPad for a few days, and then I deleted it.
It frequently hesitated between page turns, and even when I turned WiFi off by putting the iPad in 'airplane mode' it still looked like it was trying to connect to the Google servers.
But what caused me to delete the app was the totally clueless response from Google support personnel when I asked about the page turn delays.

They said older iPad and iPhone devices could cause their software to operate slowly. Really? What older versions of the iPad exist at this point?

When I pointed out that there were no 'older' versions of the iPad, they then suggested that quitting the app and restarting the app had fixed the page turn slowness for other users. Really?? That's like Microsoft support telling me to reboot my PC when Windows gets slow.

So an app that ignores most of the interface features that make the iPad such a great product combined with clueless/worthless support responses = not on my Ipad.